I've been here lurking around for about a year, and just registered in January when I installed Helena. And in all that time, I never once noticed this Introduction forum.

So, hi!

I'm a mechanical engineering graduate student who knew very little about computers four years ago, but since then I've become interested in messing around with mine. I found Mint a year ago after having heard about how "impossibly difficult" GNU/Linux was to use as an operating system (I wanted to see for myself!). I didn't want to dive in to something too complicated, and settled with Mint after seeing how nice the community (i.e. you!) seemed to be with newcomers. I've since upgraded to Isadora and love it to death. It's not just because it's free, or because it's more lightweight than Windows Vista (doesn't take much), or any of the other hundreds of reasons I've seen... but I think it's just a ton of fun . It still boggles my mind how I can have a fully functional, slick, good performing operating system on my computer for free. Open source developers are like gods.

I still keep Windows on my laptop for various work related things (I need 100% compatibility with .docx and .xlsx, and I don't want to have to obtain/install Linux versions of MATLAB, ANSYS or Pro/Engineer, though I don't use the latter two that often), but we'll see if that lasts for much longer.